The Space Shuttle Was A Mistake

That's what the current NASA Administrator is saying in an interview with USA Today:

The space shuttle and International Space Station — nearly the whole of the U.S. manned space program for the past three decades — were mistakes, NASA chief Michael Griffin said Tuesday.

In a meeting with USA TODAY's editorial board, Griffin said NASA lost its way in the 1970s, when the agency ended the Apollo moon missions in favor of developing the shuttle and space station, which can only orbit Earth.

“It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path,” Griffin said. “We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can.”

The shuttle has cost the lives of 14 astronauts since the first flight in 1982. Roger Pielke Jr., a space policy expert at the University of Colorado, estimates that NASA has spent about $150 billion on the program since its inception in 1971. The total cost of the space station by the time it's finished — in 2010 or later — may exceed $100 billion, though other nations will bear some of that.

Only now is the nation's space program getting back on track, Griffin said. He announced last week that NASA aims to send astronauts back to the moon in 2018 in a spacecraft that would look like the Apollo capsule.

The goal of returning Americans to the moon was laid out by President Bush in 2004, before Griffin took the top job at NASA. Bush also said the shuttle would be retired in 2010.

I'll bet if you asked the controllers, engineers, and even the astronauts who have been part of the program since Apollo was shut down, they'd probably agree with the Administator's assessment.

I recently watched a couple of documentaries on the US space program - Failure Is Not An Option, which dealt with Mercury through Apollo, and Failure is Not An Option II which dealt with the post-Apollo space program. One of the underlying themes from both programs was the feeling that many of the people involved in the space program felt that the US lost its way when it shut down Apollo and confined itself to earth orbital flights. The real sense of exploration went away, and many of those veterans of the program expressed regrets that America abandoned its desire to reach out beyond the earth.

Now we're talking about going back to the moon in 2014, something which we accomplished six times from 1969 through 1972 using computer techonology that was roughly equivilent to what most of us have in our digital watches today. Where would we be if we'd kept the exploration going after 1972?